Cover image courtesy of The Image Is Everything
TTR began this new "problems into solutions" series by asking people inside racing to name the industry’s biggest problem, but only if they were prepared to offer a solution as well. The first response came from Troy Corstens, the Australian Trainers Association President and Group 1-winning trainer, who argued that racing is not short on ideas. What it lacks, he said, is a genuine space for those ideas to be tested, challenged and built into something that can benefit the wider industry.
His proposed answer is the Racing Futures Lab, a concept he is already discussing with Racing Victoria as he looks to give it structure.
The starting point for Corstens’ Lab is three questions.
1. If we were building Australian racing from scratch tomorrow, what would we design differently to make it stronger?
2. Where are we currently leaving money on the table, and what practical change would unlock it?
3. What is one bold idea you would trial in the next 12 months if you knew nobody would criticise you for it?
Troy Cortens | Image courtesy of The Image Is Everything
Those questions give the concept shape. They ask racing to think about design, money and testing, rather than circling the same frustrations without a next step.
The racing version does not have to be invented from nothing. Healthcare, agriculture, finance, mining and other sports have all built ways to catch ideas before they disappear: training people already inside the system, setting problems for outsiders to solve, asking industry to co-fund the work, or testing changes in a contained setting before rolling them out more widely.
We have looked at what others have built and considered which parts could apply to racing.
The think tank
As Corstens pointed out, some of racing’s best reform ideas may come from the people already working inside the system: trainers, veterinarians, stud staff, stable staff, club staff, administrators, data people and others close enough to the daily friction to see where things get stuck.
The missing piece is a structure that helps those people develop an idea properly, rather than leaving it to sit in their own head or die after one conversation.
In the United Kingdom, the NHS launched its Clinical Entrepreneur Programme in 2016 to help healthcare staff develop ideas that could be used inside the health system. The year-long program includes events, mentoring and support to develop a project or small business, while sitting alongside the staff member’s existing work.
The program is free and open to both clinical and non-clinical NHS staff. It includes eight educational events that count towards a health professional’s continuing professional development. To date, the program has supported more than 1200 health professionals to create 500 start-ups, with more than 130 million patients and professionals benefiting from the program’s output.
Members of the NHS Clinical Entrepreneur Programme | Image courtesy of NHS
In 2024, the Patient Entrepreneur Programme was launched to support people with lived experience of a condition in a similar way. It helps them develop ideas that could improve patient care, with support from NHS England’s Patient and Public Involvement team as well as skill and knowledge development.
A professional development stream attached to a Racing Futures Lab could give people across racing the same kind of support: time, mentoring, practical tools and access to people who can help turn an idea into a project.
It would also widen the pool beyond the usual senior voices. Racing’s next useful idea may not come from someone already on a board. It may come from the person who has been dealing with the same broken process every week for five years.
A vehicle to drive change
Ideas need structure if they are going to move from discussion to implementation. Corstens’ proposal recognises that by asking what happens after the idea is raised: who owns it, who tests it, and how does it become something the industry can judge?
Dubai Future Accelerators creates that space for entrepreneurs. Start-ups are encouraged to apply to the DFA’s open challenges, where the creators of selected solutions are flown to Dubai to workshop their idea further. They are paired with government and private-sector partners to collaborate on the problem, before presenting to decision-makers, who choose the best proposal to advance to a commercial agreement.
Recent cohorts of start-ups have explored challenges around water purification and waste water disposal, smart monitoring of public transport use, and AI-powered analytics for parsing research papers.
In a similar capacity, the UAE Government Accelerators is a government platform that specifically targets challenges faced by federal and local governments. Like the DFA, the government identifies the challenges and the people or bodies relevant to them, then selects teams to address those challenges within a short period of time. Once results have been achieved on a small scale, the Government Accelerators look at whether those results can be sustained and scaled.
Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum launching Future Accelerators programme | Image courtesy of Gulf Business
A racing version would need the same discipline around the problem. If the question is race programming, the Lab needs programmers, trainers, owners, breeders, wagering people, data analysts and clubs. If the question is market confidence, it needs breeders, buyers, agents, vets, sales companies and insurers. If the question is where racing is leaving money behind, it needs people who can see the commercial leaks rather than only defend their own patch.
That is the part racing could borrow: define the challenge first, then build the room around it.
The FIFA Innovation Programme provides another platform for putting ideas to the test. FIFA sets out the questions it wants answered, with current challenges involving the future of fan engagement, skeletal tracking technology and goal-line technology. Successful applicants can explore their proposed solutions further with FIFA’s backing. The program sets a testing schedule and timeline for each proposal, with successful outcomes able to be implemented across FIFA events and into the laws of the game.
For racing, that kind of testing schedule would be important. A bold idea should not need universal national agreement before it begins. It needs a defined trial, a limited setting, a timeframe and a decision at the end about whether it goes further.
By looking at the Australian mining equipment, technology and services Industry Growth Centre, METS Ignited, we can see how a version of this could be funded.
Launched in 2016, METS Ignited received funding from the Australian Government Department of Industry, Science and Resources, and in turn invested more than $16 million into 35 collaborative projects. It supported the launch and development of 20 new companies in the mining sector. It also delivered 24 industry accelerators and 55 masterclasses, with the aim of improving training and knowledge across the industry.
Professional development with METS Ignited | Image courtesy of Mining Technology
Critically, the program was able to attract funding from the industry, which matched the initial government funding two-and-a-half times over.
A similar entity in the Thoroughbred industry could attract investment from clubs, PRAs, breeders, syndicators, wagering operators, media businesses and aftercare groups. Cash would help, but access may be just as valuable: a race meeting, a sales season, a regional circuit, a training centre, a dataset, a media channel, a group of owners or a group of horses.
The funding model would force a useful test. If the idea is important, who is prepared to back it?
Putting ideas into practice
The Australian red meat industry’s biggest research entity, Meat & Livestock Australia, has championed putting research into practice through its Producer Demonstration Sites.
The organisation makes an open call for project concepts every two years and allows farms and producer groups to approach it with project proposals based on existing research. Funding grants range from $30,000 to $100,000, depending on the scale of the project.
Regional significance is a dominant aspect of each project, which tests how research results perform outside a controlled environment, where seasonal and region-specific variations might affect the outcome. It is also an opportunity for peer-to-peer learning within the community around each project, with site groups putting on educational events as the project progresses.
Field walk at a Producer Demonstration Site | Image courtesy of Meat & Livestock Australia
An example currently taking place in New South Wales’s Southern Tablelands and Tasmania is looking at best-practice management techniques for mitigating flystrike in non-mulesed sheep.
The project aims to show how combining management tools such as appropriate worm control, strategic shearing and genetic selection can be an effective alternative to mulesing, which involves removing skin from the hindquarters of lambs. Producer demonstration sites have held annual field days and several on-site workshops across the project’s five-year timeframe, with results due to be published in 2026.
The racing equivalent would be demonstration sites.
A programming idea could be tested in one region. A buyer-confidence idea could be tested at one sale. A research finding could be trialled at one training centre, stud or racing region. A data project could begin with a small number of willing bodies proving it works, before anyone tries to build a national system.
That approach would suit racing, as an industry more likely to believe an idea when it can see the practicalities, resistance, uptake and result in a real setting.
The AgriFutures Australia Thoroughbred Horses Division and Thoroughbred Breeders Australia already help fund research, but as recently discussed in TTR, the industry could do more to drive adoption of useful work.
AgriFutures Australia Programs | Image courtesy of AgriFutures Australia
A Racing Futures Lab could help bridge that gap. If research identifies a welfare risk, a production issue or a better practice, the Lab could help find the place to test it, the people to own it, and the method for showing the result.
An example of this in practice is United Kingdom’s Financial Conduct Authority's Regulatory Sandbox, a safe space for firms to test new products live in the market with real consumers, but with guardrails. The FCA assigns a case manager to each test, which is typically conducted on a small scale, over a short and set timeframe, with a limited number of customers.
Applicants can give their products a dry run, find out whether the product is actually what customers want, and identify consumer protection safeguards the product may need.
Between 2014 and 2022, the Regulatory Sandbox accepted and tested products from 168 firms, including Lloyds Bank, which tested the use of algorithms to provide more personalised recommendations for customers making investments. By keeping the project contained within the Sandbox’s guardrails, the product was exposed to real-world pressures without the risk of large-scale failure if it had been launched straight into the market.
Racing has its own version of this problem. Ideas are often stopped early because people can imagine everything that might go wrong. Then, if a poor system is launched widely, it becomes hard to pull back because too many people are attached to it.
A contained trial sits between those two habits.
In 2024, World Rugby unveiled its law labs to accompany opt-in closed law trials available to rugby unions and competitions. The labs allow World Rugby to trial potential new laws in controlled environments, then evaluate how the law performs using both objective data points and player feedback before implementing it into regulation.
World Rugby's Law Book app | Image courtesy of Women's Rugby
The parallel between World Rugby and horse racing is clear; if Corstens’ Racing Futures Lab is to work, ideas need a way to leave the room. Each idea needs a problem, an owner, a test site, a timeline, guardrails and a result the industry can inspect.
That is what the best examples above have in common. They do not treat ideas as finished because they have been discussed but they give them a path to go next.
What could racing test first?
Corstens’ three founding questions offer a starting point for the first round of projects.
If racing was being built from scratch tomorrow, one project could look at race programming against horse supply. How many foals and runners does the industry actually need to sustain the program it wants? What parts of the current program are most exposed if the foal crop keeps falling? Could a different regional model better match the horses available? How many horses can be globally placed in a sustainable rehoming model?
If racing is leaving money on the table, one project could look at data held separately by clubs, PRAs, sales companies, wagering operators and ownership groups. What value sits inside that separation? What could be tested with a small group of willing partners?
If the Lab wanted one bold idea to trial within 12 months, it could look at the lower and middle parts of the bloodstock market. Could buyer confidence be improved through clearer information, better education, post-sale support or more transparent disclosure around who is legitimately buying and selling each horse? Or it could tackle the biggest elephant in the room for potential fans of racing - unlimited use of the whip in the last 100 metres.
Corstens’ idea is exciting, and the Lab will ultimately be judged on what leaves the room: an owner, a test site, a deadline and a result racing can inspect. If he and Racing Victoria can build that structure around the concept, the industry may have built an innovative space where everyone's better ideas finally survive the meeting.
